In
this controversial interview, first published in the Literary
Review, V S Naipaul speaks to Farrukh Dhondy about
Half A Life, his first novel in 22 years, and lashes out against
other established writers, some of them his contemporaries: Forster:
"…someone who didn't know Indian people", Narayan: "…his India is a ruin",
Soyinka: "…a marvelously Establishment figure actually" and Joyce: "…he is
not interested in the world." While indulging in his characteristic
plain-speak, Naipaul manages to remain consistently insightful about the
big issues: religion, history, society and the writerly life, without ever
losing sight of the individual struggles for existence that constitute the
heart of the human condition. In doing so, he shows how a writer's
worldview, achieved after a painful journey of self-discovery and
self-knowledge, can hold important lessons for humanity.

I drive to
Wiltshire on a rare sunny English summer's day to interview V S Naipaul in
his country home. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are to be
reissued (by Picador in Britain and Knopf in the USA), and this interview
anticipates the publication next month of his new novel, Half a
Life. Before we begin our conversation, Vidia shows me round his
garden, which stretches for an acre down a slope to the water meadows of
the River Avon. It contains myriad shades of green, the deep purple of
copper beech, several varieties of holly, some white blossoms, but no
flowerbeds. Vidia tells me the names of the trees and the prospects for
their growth, saying two or three times what a copse or hedge will look
like in years to come, 'when I shall be gone'.

You said not long
ago that the novel doesn't interest you any more, that 'the novel is
finished'. But you've written one now. Was that declaration just a
tease?No. The
novel is so bastardised a form, and it's so passing. Everyone writes a
novel, and it's so much a copy, unconsciously, unwittingly, of novels that
have gone before. The really true books are the ones that last - not the
copies. I was saying that I preferred reading the
originals.

This latest novel finds a new way of telling a story.
Why is it called Half a Life?It's a lovely title.

It does fit.Yes, it does fit.

But you don't want
to give the game away?You must allow me to keep a few secrets.

All right. It's
not set out in dramatic scenes. I was reminded of your non-fiction, of
India: A Million Mutinies Now and of Beyond Belief, where
you recreate the stories real people tell you.Plain narrative,
yes.

It's different from your other fiction. If one adapted
A House for
Mr Biswas for the screen for instance, the dialogue is all virtually
there. To adapt Half a Life would be different.I've always tried not to write the same book. Every book is new. It
does different things. The material was knocking around in my head for a
quarter of a century. I don't keep a journal, but sometimes when I'm moved
by certain things I just make very brief notes in a particular notebook.
So there have been notes about this for a long time. But I didn't find any
way of putting it together. I got taken up with these major books you
mentioned. They were very taxing. But I had this material, and my
publishers and my agent required me to do a work of imagination. I was
required to do it.

Well, it's a very powerful work of the
imagination. It takes us through three different settings, and three
different eras, and we meet people in different ways. We follow its
central character, Willy, from pre-independence India, to postwar London,
to a Portuguese province in Africa. I
tried to make it easy, and light, and a small book, and yet full of
things.

The theme is that of man in our times looking for a life and
perhaps having to borrow a life. Never living life to the
full?Don't you
think most people or many of the people we know are like
that?

Possibly, but I hadn't thought of it in those terms before.
I didn't estimate the percentage of life people had acquired for
themselves. But it's a telling way of
estimation.I
think most people think about it, and you feel less critical of yourself
for not achieving a full life. You will understand that many people are
living only fractions of lives.

There is a sense of sadness
throughout in the failures of Willy, of his family. And what comes out
strongly is sexual failure: his own experience, his conviction that his
parents never achieved proper sexual experience.
You know we
are not responsible for what comes out in a book. We are not fully in
control of it. What comes over is probably quite different from what we
intend. I spent much more time working out the narrative very slowly,
almost picture by picture. Now that you've said that about the sex, I
suppose it is true. I think it probably reflects something in my own life,
a lack of sexual fulfilment until quite late. And then although sex may be
very prominent in this, as you've discovered, there is no absurd
description of sex at all.

Nothing that would qualify for the
'Bad Sex Prize'.(Laughs)
Nothing like that.

You've used four-letter words a few times,
which you've not done in previous books.I tried to leave them out and it looked
absurd, so I went back and spelt the word out. I made them say it as they
would say it. On the sexual theme, I think everybody's sexuality is very
important. Seduction is important, and the grossness of pornographic
writing annihilates the importance of it. It suggests that you just have
to deal with it in this gross way, and you've handled the matter. But it's
too profound to be dealt with in that way. In a way the physical
description of sex, which is what people go to the books for sometimes, is
very far from the difficulties of fulfilment.

My concern in the
book is also the historical side of things. Willy runs away from his
background, and even when he gets to Africa, this Portuguese province, he
is reminded of the background from which he came.

We will return to
the new book later. Can we go back to when you started to write? You have
written about waiting for an agonising time before you knew what it was
you had to write. You describe the first sentence that came to you when
you were working in the Langham Hotel building of the BBC. It's from
Miguel
Street. And yet that wasn't your first published book. Could you
clarify the chronology?It's
actually an important question: it's part of the pain I suffered when I
was beginning. I wrote Miguel Street first, and it was taken by
Andrew Salkey, a friend, to André Deutsch. Diana Athill, the editor at
Deutsch, liked it, but André Deutsch, who knew about these things, said
'short stories don't sell'. And they kept the book for a long time. I had
little moments of terror, panic. They wanted a novel first, so I wrote
The Mystic Masseur. I finished it in January 1956. It should have
been published that year. To a destitute man it mattered to be published.
Of course you can't wait six months and then six months again. But The
Mystic Masseur wasn't published until May 1957, and then another
novel, and finally, in 1959, they published Miguel Street. The
stories, which had been written in 1955, have never been out of print;
they've made a fortune for André Deutsch. But look at the trouble they
gave me. The publishers could have eased my path a little, but they
didn't. It was the trouble I had with André Deutsch. He believed that only
one person's interest had to be served. But it must be said that at that
time, in 1955 or thereabouts, it would have been hard for my material to
be considered a real book by any London publisher. André Deutsch took it
up and I think it was because of Diana Athill. She was a remarkable
editor, she always softened the awfulness of the man
Deutsch.

You say softened - and you often use the word 'hard' in
your autobiographical pieces. You use the same word about your father and
his life and ambition. What does the word mean?A very simple thing. Shall we say for my father it means - heaven
knows where the spark came from, in that plantation colony of Trinidad -
getting the wish to be a writer and not having anyone interested. To this
day they're not interested. I would say that my father's grandchildren are
not interested in his work. It's bitter, isn't it?

Why was it
so?Well, my wife's daughter has recently been looking at
some of my father's writing. She's from Pakistan. She's enchanted by the
writing, because the people he was writing about are closer to the
subcontinent. That's one reason. And the other reason is that we come from
a peasant culture. It's not a literary culture. There's no tradition of
reading. There's sacred reading, there's reading of the epics, there's
reading of the scriptures on religious occasions. And there is an oddity,
then, in his ambition, that he should want to write when in his culture
there is no tradition of reading or writing.

That becomes a
theme in Mystic Masseur doesn't it? The main character wants to
write and doesn't know what on earth to write about. So he reads all these
books, orders them by mail.You know
the Masseur is slightly autobiographical, symbolically, because the wish
to be a writer represented my own wish. The hardness for me was actually
learning how to write.

But the Masseur doesn't. His first book is a hundred questions
and answers about Hinduism.Yes. That's
his book. And the author of the book is wishing that it could be so easy
for him too. Actually I had an uncle who wrote a book like
that.But
after these first few books you were well established, so it must have
been easier.It didn't
feel easier even then. I was still poor. I mean actually destitute for a
very long time, and it was all made worse because I didn't see myself
becoming a writer, I didn't see how to move. People have said, looking at
the letters that were published two years ago, 'the writer was always
there'. But I think that becoming a writer means knowing exactly who you
are. Are you funny, are you grim? Are you heavy, are you light? You have
to know. In the beginning I tried to do farce. I began a novel in 1949,
when I was seventeen, and finished it at Oxford. I gave it to a friend and
he said cruelly it reminded him of Evelyn Waugh and he was
right.

What happened to that novel?Oh, nothing happened to it. Farce wasn't
right for me.

You never used it again?I'm sure I did. I may have used ideas and
bits. The Mystic Masseur had something of it. And I think the
African characters in The Mimic Men occurred
there.

Was the hardship of those early years something to do with
not having an assured audience? Because today an Indian writer, say, or a
black poet has an assured audience, at least amongst the
Guardian
readership. When you set out there was no such audience
evident.I was
unaware of any audience here or elsewhere. I had never thought of the
problem of who would read the books. If I had thought of it, I probably
would have stopped writing. I didn't think of it like that. I believed in
the purity of literature. I believed that if one wrote, and one wrote
well, there would be readers.

So you wrote, oblivious of whom you were
addressing? No, not oblivious. Later, it began to wear me down, the fact that I
had no audience. I almost began to envy people who had a direct link with
a particular audience. I was always a foreigner: to use an American word,
I was always an import; so that was hard, and became harder as time went
on. In the beginning I was much simpler, I addressed my writing to one
person. I wrote for Pat, my wife. I read everything out to her. And then
sometimes I was also mentally addressing, in those early days, Francis
Wyndham or Diana Athill.

But don't you think success came, as you
progressed, quite soon?I had no success.

You were immediately
commissioned to write other books, like The Middle Passage.That was an accident. That was Eric Williams, Prime
Minister of Trinidad. The Trinidadian government came to power in 1956
and, in this flush of wanting to be grand, gave me a scholarship to return
to Trinidad for six months. And when I was there Eric Williams invited me
to have lunch, and a very simple lunch as I remember - I think it was
plantains or something like that - and then raised this question, would I
travel and write a book about the colonial territories in the Caribbean?
The expenses were to be paid by them. I think I was required to hasten the
process of decolonisation. And because Williams had approached me, André
Deutsch had to publish the book. But the book I wrote as a result was
never acknowledged by Williams.

I think
The Middle
Passage is an important book in several ways. It sets the tone for the
explorations that you have undertaken among the new nations,
civilisations, awakenings of the twentieth century. This is the first real
book about the newly decolonised world and it's funny and full of
unexplored truths. How did you approach this task?I was very nervous. I simply didn't know how to
travel for a book, I didn't know what to do. I enjoyed travelling, I
enjoyed going to Guyana and Surinam, finding a little hotel and staying in
it, seeing locals, going to dinner with people, and being invited. I
didn't know how to make a narrative of that. The making of the book is
more important sometimes to the writer than the things said. I thought I
was writing the obvious in The Middle Passage, and I dealt with the
problem of not knowing how to make a narrative of my travelling by being
autobiographical in one section, and then by following a politician, Dr
Cheddi Jagan of Guyana, in the second section.

But there were
objections to the book at the time, from the Caribbean.There are quotations in it from the Chancellor or the
Vice-Chancellor of the new University of the West Indies, who says: 'We
come from the Christian tradition or Judaeo-Christian heritage.' At the
time there was a belief in the Caribbean that they were a European people
and I was saying, you are Africans. And my stressing the fact that they
were people of African origin was unacceptable. It was as though I was
making simple statements look like wicked jokes, that black could be white
and things like that, which offended a lot of people.

But ironically in
the early Seventies…It became radical, it became the received wisdom. By then they
began to assert something else, an African identity, but by that time the
writer's myth was established. The myth was 'this man against me'. And
people don't even read the book any longer, they just babble on about it.
But it has come full circle.

And then in your next book of travel, a
journey through India called An Area of Darkness there are more
unacceptable truths. It created a huge stir in India. I must confess that
reading it at college was a revelation: it made one aware of things that
were hitherto invisible, but right in front of one's eyes. And yet I found
it difficult to argue wholeheartedly for the book amongst my friends. My
admiration had to be a sly secret. Tell me how you came to write An
Area of Darkness. Why India? Oh,
ancestral land. I was close to India in my upbringing. I grew up in a
very, very Indian household. That was the world for me. And there was also
the independence struggle, which was taking place when I was in my teens.
That mattered to me.

And you had kept abreast of
it?Oh
absolutely. All our family did.

So India was self-discovery?
Well, the
truth was that I was shattered by India, by what I saw. The things I saw
just seemed to be repetitive, and I didn't think there was a book there. I
felt there wasn't a book in my travels. And for three months afterwards I
did nothing. I was faced with the possibility of having to give the £500
advance back to André Deutsch, so I wrote the book. What I did was I
opened an exercise book, and put down on two sheets all the things that
struck me, with little headings, and I looked at them; and I made a shape,
and more or less followed that shape. The book changes in mood and manner.
It's now writing about literature, it's now telling about the writer being
in Kashmir, it talks about arrival and then talks about visiting ancestral
villages - but that was the way it was done.

The book violated
our central Indian preserve of nationalism, an uncritical and often
mendacious glossing over history, over poverty, prejudice, superstition,
caste, cruelty, hypocrisy, filth, etcetera. India didn't want any of that
talked about. Didn't that reaction come back to
you?Not
really. I was doing my work, I had to keep alive, I had to write another
book. And you must remember at a very early stage I stopped reading the
critics. I didn't like seeing my name in print, and hurried past it
whenever I saw it. That's still true.

Nissim Ezekiel, a well-known
poet, edited a collection of essays against An Area of
Darkness.I didn't
know. I didn't think of it that way, as an attack on India. I thought of
it as a record of my unhappiness. I wasn't knocking anybody, it was a
great melancholy experience actually. Mark you, it's full of flaws: what
it says about caste is influenced by ideas I had picked up here, British
ideas. I think differently about caste now. I understand the clan feeling,
the necessity of that in a big country. And the book was bad about Indian
art. I should have understood that art depends on patrons, and that in
Independent India, with the disappearance of Indian royal courts, the
possibility for art had been narrowed - instead of thinking that this was
rather terrible, that there was no art. It will nag at me now, it will nag
at me for some years.

Years later you return to India and that
journey results in A Wounded Civilization, which is much less a travel book.
It brings to the surface movements from below that haven't been looked at
by Indian writers.Yes, the
book is different. The result of an American commission. The publisher
asked me to go and look at the Emergency that had been imposed on the
country by Indira Gandhi's government. A modern way of doing that, a
cannier way, would have been to go to India, chat to a few dissidents and
journalists, and do that kind of report. But I preferred to do
this.The
book is unusual. It tries to make sense, in one section, of the Shiv Sena,
regarded in India as a provincial, even a fascist movement. You express
empathy and see them as the only party who care about hygiene, about
health, about the destitution of the slums in which they operate. The main
characteristic of the book is its urge to get under the surface of these
phenomena with a tremendous sympathy. It is the opposite of ideological.
What compelled you to attempt that? Because of my background I have the most sympathy with these
movements coming from below. I don't forget my peasant origins in this
way, and that we were unprotected, our family, people like us in Trinidad.
We had no voice. And in this way I'm quite different from Indian writers.
I'm different from Mr Nehru and people like Indira Gandhi. I don't think
those people ever knew the Indian peasantry. I think very few Indian
writers know or have a feel for their mentality and their lives even now.
They're middle-class chaps. But I came directly from the other. In spite
of the transplantation, my ancestors going to Trinidad, and in spite of
education, and being a writer and everything else - those are my origins
and perhaps this is why my sympathy is there. And I could always
understand them, the peasantry, the landless, the people below giving
themselves a break for the first time for centuries, perhaps even for a
millennium or more.

And that was the book in which I began to
understand the nature of the Indian calamity, what had happened to India:
and that was when I began to question, where I went against, the teaching
of the independence movement that spoke of the two cultures, the two
religions being one really - and I saw that India had been crushed by the
Muslims. I didn't see this clearly, I saw it later, but that book begins
to deal with that idea. And I think this is a book which only someone of
my background could write, because middle-class, self-deceiving Indian
people wouldn't think like that.

Underlying your observation of
India there is the historical perception that the Muslim rule of India
which spanned perhaps five or six centuries destroyed much of Hindu India.
The wounded civilisation is seen as a society which has been historically
mutated, truncated and damaged by proselytising and intolerant Islam. You
begin to see this in India: A Wounded Civilization.In my analysis of Narayan's novel at the beginning of
India: A Wounded Civilization, I think it's clearly stated about
the invaders. But Narayan speaks about the invaders in this general way,
and I suppose I myself was just dealing with the invaders in this general
way, not specifying or researching the acts of the Muslim conquerors, the
rulers and their governors.

The thing about being an Indian, and
it remains true of Indian writing now, is that it seems to work without
history, in a vacuum. Indian writers don't know why their country is in
such a mess. They can't understand the poverty of India, they don't know
why seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travellers talk of a derelict
countryside. Very easy to think that it might be because of the British,
but much easier in fact to pay no attention to it at all. This lack in
Indian writing, even in Narayan's writing, is a fatal flaw.

Narayan
grew up a day's journey from Hampi, where there are these extraordinary
ruins of the city of Vijayanagar, capital of the ancient Hindu kingdom,
which I went to see in 1962. And this destruction had been done in 1565. I
think a writer like Narayan should have understood what had happened,
especially as he'd written a guidebook to the area. But he didn't respond
to that. In a way perhaps the defeat had been too great. How can you write
about your setting, your culture, if you can't see what happened 400 years
ago? He has a really magical way of writing and looking, but his picture
is incomplete.

Because it has no historical
perspective?It
stands on no history. It hangs in the air.

But he writes about a place he
has created, an imaginary town, Malgudi, like Hardy's
Wessex.Yes,
and he thinks it's eternal. In fact, his India is a ruin, he's writing
about a ruin. And indeed you should ask, who created the ruin? Why is
there this ruin? The ruin wasn't eternal.

You explore the theme
in great detail in your last and major work about India, India: A
Million Mutinies Now. It has a huge sweep and a powerful underlying
theory of the progress of a myriad classes and kinds of people. And the
form is startling too. It is virtually a chain of biographies that define
the subcontinent, biographies of ordinary and extraordinary but neglected
people. Why do you call them mutinies?It discovers modern India through the revolts, then further revolt,
the individual mutinies. And 'mutiny' is a simple word meaning people
wishing to assert themselves. People coming up, the wounded people, the
wounded civilisation, using these British-given institutions to assert
themselves after independence. They have had no voice for so long, but now
they are in the process of being someone. To me that's very
moving.

It is a very hopeful book. And again embodies the compassion
from below. I remember you correcting me when I first asked you about it,
telling me they were 'stories' not
'interviews'.They are stories. In an interview you are getting someone's
opinions, and I was very particular in this book, I wanted people's
experience, and for the experience to illuminate something. One
experience, one illumination, linked to another - it's linked in that way,
it makes a pattern. I remember when I began it I spent so many days in the
Taj Hotel in Bombay, wondering how to move. Where do you start? Then a
reporter, Laxman, a person I had been in touch with, began to understand
what I wanted, and he took me to the Shiv Sena, which had now become a
political force in Bombay. It was just one of these happy accidents, we
began like that. I talked to people who people would not have looked at
before. Indian writers wouldn't want the stories: they would do social
surveys about the very poor and the very wretched. And then I met a man
from the Atomic Energy Commission whose grandfather had been a priest in a
temple. So when I went down south I looked for this person, to understand
how over a couple of generations one can breed atomic scientists from
families steeped in ancient religion. I was interested in that sort of
discovery.

It has been said that your historical analysis of the
Islamic conquests and destruction in India plays into the hands of
divisive politicians, setting Hindus against Muslims today, and gives
succour to the Hindu extremist. People who say that have no wish to understand
history, or what is created by history, or the movements that are part of
a response to history. They have their own idea of history in this
respect. It's - to use this word, which is actually a good word - a
construct. It's a construct that came about during the independence
movement.

Whose construct? Was it Nehru's,
Gandhi's?I
think Nehru had a hand. Gandhi didn't construct it. Gandhi in a way had a
pretty good idea of the damage, but he felt that India had survived it
all. But he knew what had happened.

What evidence is there that
Gandhi knew or shared the idea that the Muslims had destroyed Hindu
civilisation?No, I'm not saying it as boldly as that. I'm thinking of his book
about Indian Home Rule, Hind Swaraj, where he talks about the
anguish of India, etcetera. I'm assuming he knows a little bit why the
anguish is there. He thought the British made it all; the British made it,
yes, but it started long before then.

You do understand the argument
of the nationalists, like Nehru… They had to get people together for the independence
movement, and they had to tell stories.

Is it dangerous to violate
that story? To point at the Muslim past? I don't think it's dangerous. I think it's
necessary to violate that story. Indians wonder why their country is a
country of misery. I have some idea of this land trampled over, and why it
was trampled over. Every country has a history. Indians live in a country
without seeing the history.

So without understanding there is no
redemption?No,
I don't think so.

You don't think that knowing the truth about
that history would predispose anybody to be anti-Islam or
anti-whatever?I think that the Muslim people of India should know the history
too, and in fact just across the border in Pakistan they know the history.
They boast of the history. So why should people just across the border in
India pretend it doesn't exist? What kind of nonsense is this? In their
junior history books it's there. 'We conquered, and looted. And we
destroyed. We did away with all the idols, we did away with all the
temples. Yes, it was our land'. The Pakistani dream is one day that
there'll be a Muslim resurgence and they will lead the prayers in the
mosques in Delhi. You can hear that in Pakistan.

Can you? I didn't
know that the Pakistanis were about to do that to
India.But it
is a kind of dream.

Well, let's hope they see sense.
It wasn't just the nationalists, you know.
People write such rubbish about the three religions of India. People like
E M Forster make a pretence of making poetry of the three religions. It's
false. It's a pretence. It's utter rubbish.

You are alluding to
A Passage to India, which is divided into sections entitled
'Temple', 'Mosque', etcetera. I don't
know what it means, and I don't think Forster knows what it means, or knew
what it means. Forster wrote so many prefaces to that book, he couldn't
decide. It has only one real scene, and that's the foolish little tea
party at the beginning. I don't think there is another real scene. Forster
of course has his own purposes in India. He is a homosexual and he has his
time in India, exploiting poor people, which his friend Keynes also did.
Keynes didn't exploit poor people, he exploited people in the university;
he sodomised them, and they were too frightened to do anything about it.
Forster belonged to that kind of nastiness really. I know it might be
liberally wonderful now to say it's OK, but I think it's awful. That's the
background to all the mystery and the lies.

And you think that
A Passage to
India reflects this background with mysterious lies, or lying
mysteries?I think
people don't actually read it, you know.

F R Leavis, in
Scrutiny, published a sceptical review saying that there
was a hollow mystery at the heart of the novel which Forster didn't quite
understand himself.Yes, it's a
lying mystery.

Don't you think Forster gave us anything
about India?He
encouraged people to lie. He was somebody who didn't know Indian people.
He just knew the court and a few middle-class Indians and the garden boys
whom he wished to seduce.

In Among the Believers and then seventeen
years later in Beyond Belief, you visit and revisit the countries
which are converts to Islam - Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan - and
again write the stories of people there, from ordinary people to
Vice-Presidents and the murderous Mulla Khalkhali. I was interested in these convert societies,
converted to Islam, whose history now begins in Arabia. It's as though
they have no history before the coming of Islam. All that is wiped out.
Look at Indonesia: these converts, encouraged by Saudi money, are
destroying the native culture of those islands. Destroying their own
culture and country.

Yes, but saying so doesn't make you popular.
I think both books explain these societies in a way that no-one has done
before and they point to real dangers to civilisation. I would say that
Beyond
Belief, apart from embodying this theory, is a book full of compassion
for the people and their experience. Still, the opinion persists, perhaps
among those who don't read your books, that you are a pessimist - an
acerbic, critical writer. Why do you think this is?These things happen over the course of a writer's
life. I used to be called a satirist. I don't know what I was supposed to
be satirising. The reason is probably that I've never been an official
writer - many colonial chaps, their passion is to be an official writer.
Latin America is full of nothing but official writers.

You mean as they
were in the Soviet Union?No, an official writer is someone whose views do not
harm the Establishment, the government, authority of all kinds. I was
thinking about Latin America, where most writers are trying to be official
writers, who do what is required of them, who do what they feel they are
expected to do. It is full of official writers who offend no one, and
leave Latin America eternally in its mess, because they offend no one. The
truth is dodged, the mess continues.

Can you say the same about
Africa? For instance, writers like Soyinka were persecuted in Nigeria.
I think
Soyinka's a marvellously Establishment figure
actually.

You have written about Africa quite extensively. You've
written novels, essays. The problem of writing about Africa would seem to
me to go much further than simply being anti-government. The continent's
writers don't seem to be critically penetrative of their own societies in
any profound way.A certain kind of society stimulates a kind of profound writing.
Other societies, which are not profound, offer little scope for
intellectual adventure. Certain societies are quite limited. It is
difficult anyhow to be profound about them.

In a Free State, A
Bend in the River, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro, and now part of
your latest novel, Half a Life. I'd never have imagined writing so
much about Africa.

You've written about territories that
weren't looked at - Congo; Rwanda; Burundi, in In a Free State … it's
thereabouts?Around
there, yes.

And you were predicting, in fiction, the violence to come
forty years later? The child soldiers who kill and eat each
other?It's
terrible. It's terrible.

What made you venture
there?Again,
because of the background, the Trinidad background. I grew up in that
little island where there were Indians and Africans. Just as I have a
feeling for Indian peasant movements or Indian working movements, so I
have some kind of feeling for Africa. I wasn't going to Africa cold - or
with any sexual intent.

You are endlessly curious about emerging
societies. In the Africa you write about, the Congo is in turmoil, Idi
Amin expels the Asians from Uganda, the colonials are in retreat from
guerrillas, dictators set themselves up and are worse despots than the
colonial rulers - you go and observe and write. Now for a writer to go
into that you must have some certainty about yourself, some certainty of
belief, some moral centre. Even if it's as minimal as 'eating people is
wrong'. There are
two sides to the thing about Africa and about what I wrote. I had a great
interest - an ignorant interest, I should say as well - in African art.
And through that I have a feeling for the religions of the earth, if you
can call or classify African religions as that. They're so mysterious, and
really to me quite wonderful. The missionary who wants to convert them all
to a revealed religion is arrogant and destructive. I'm interested in this
ancient thing from the earth. Religious Africa. If one reads Virgil, there
is a lot of mystery about Rome, the founding of Rome, Roman religion, its
antiquity. And there is the same thing of course in this culture, African
culture, the dark continent. They come from very far back. They are very
mysterious things, I find these things wonderful. That was my initial
interest in Africa, a reason for going there.

But you asked about
this belief, the central belief, a moral scheme. When I began to write
years ago, you could have said: 'You are writing about these simple people
as though you knew a better world, and of course you don't, so why are you
writing like this?' My wife said this to me - she was not my wife in 1952,
she was a friend, a great encourager of my writing, but one vacation she
wrote me this letter. (I was reading the reply about two months ago, and
it remains true, although I was only nineteen then.) I said to her that I
believe in a kind of cumulative conscience of mankind. We all possess this
conscience. I will stick to that.An instinctive right and wrong?
It's more
like knowing yourself. I feel that that gives you the place where you
stand. You don't have to know something better, but you have a place where
you stand.

Where does that come from?In my own case it came from certain circumstances, it's difficult
to explain - the fact that my father was a writer and I found a great
moral quality in his writing, and so I had this at an early age. And it
gave one a place to stand, the moral centre.

Does all writing
need to do that? Should it be an expression of moral
sensibility?Inevitably
if you write narrative there must be a moral sense, because a moral sense
explains causes. Otherwise everything becomes irrational. If you don't
have a moral sense you can't say why things happened.

A writer like James
Joyce is not primarily concerned with narrative, though. He is more
concerned with allusion and wordplay. And he begins the century of writing
with an amoral style.I can't read it. Joyce was going blind and I can't understand the
work of a blind writer. Where did he live? In Trieste. In the last days of
the Austro-Hungarian empire. But he is not interested in the world. He
writes about Dublin and his own convolutions, Catholic guilt. He is not
interested in the world.

Does a writer have to
be?Yes. To
illuminate something for people. You see, coming from where I did, I had
to write about the history of where I came from - forgotten people. I had
to write about India. I had to, as it were, approach it in my own way. It
took a lot of work.

We have talked about the approach to India
but your next work on the Caribbean can properly be called a historical
work, albeit an unusual one. The Loss of El Dorado tells the story of
Trinidad, of Walter Raleigh's doomed search for a city of gold, of the
extermination of the Caribs and then of a troubled and tragic history. Why
did you get interested in that kind of history?I believe that all writing has some element of accident about it.
An American publisher was doing a series about cities, and the proposal
first came to my agent, and I thought I would do a very quick book. And
then I found that the history of Port of Spain had not been written. One
had to go to the documents, the original ones. I looked at more and more
of the source material and the narrative altered. We were brought up to
believe that Trinidad had almost no history, that slavery had affected the
other islands but it hadn't affected Trinidad to any great extent. And I
went and found that it was not so. It had an awful story. I wrote it in
the way I did all my other writing - I attempted a narrative, I wrote
about people, a human story. I wasn't looking to make points about
history, I wasn't writing a textbook, I was trying to make everything
live.

And it does.Then at the same time I was trying to see the slave
society, seeing this awful thing at work. I was concerned with the way men
behaved when unbridled, when there is no control. It's dreadful. So that
was the subject of the book. I was marked by the labour for a long time
actually.

And the response to the book? I've always looked at it as a unique way of doing
history. It's a human story. It was written between 1966 and 1968. The
publisher who commissioned it rejected it. It was not the book he wanted.
The great labour was not required: he wanted a tourist guide about shops
and things.

Oh dear.Ten thousand dollars advance. I didn't get the second five
thousand. I didn't give back the first five because Knopf took the book
over. Diana Athill liked it. But when the book was published here it had a
poor response. People simply didn't know what I was writing about. In the
year of its publication, 1969, the best-selling book was The Conquistadors, by the thriller writer Hammond Innes. It
was the old story about the glories of Cortez and the Spanish conquest of
the Americas. But The Loss
of Eldorado has made its
way very slowly. Historians don't like it. Historian friends didn't think
it was a real book. I suppose they wanted theories, comments about the
Spanish Empire, they wanted me to be like themselves.

But there is a
theory, except it's not a historical theory: a particular brand of
adventure led to a particular brand of immorality, which rebounds on
itself. That's the moral of El Dorado, the greed for gold leads to
great tragedy in the island - hangings, floggings, burnings, irrationality
and death.Terrible. In 1968 I was taken into this world, and it's
very hard to forget it. So I was learning. The world is expanding around
me all the time. I'm getting social ideas. Knowledge came to me very
slowly, and through the books I wrote.In two books, The Killings in
Trinidad, a non-fiction account, and then in Guerrillas, a
novel, you use the same material to do quite different things. Both tell
the story of Michael X, who turned up in London and became a sort of
fraudulent black leader. He came from Trinidad. When there is nothing at
the back of people, when there is no achievement, no career, then fantasy
and lies take over. Michael came to London as Michael de Freitas. He was a
pimp in London in the Fifties and found that it was profitable to promote
himself as a racial victim. And he found a lot of encouragers. He went out
to Trinidad and he was encouraged by all kinds of people there who looked
forward to him becoming the ruler of Trinidad, the leader of revolution
and everything else. He changed his name a few times and finally this
Michael X was the leader of the blacks, to his rich patrons
here.

I think that book explores the rise of a particular kind of
fraudulence in our times. False histories, made-up identities, people
becoming famous because other famous people said that they should be
famous. You know John Lennon endorsed Michael X and gave him
money?Well,
I'll tell you what happened. I actually was in Trinidad at the end of
1971, by which time this Michael X had murdered and buried people. And out
of interest I went to look at the house and the holes where the people
were buried, and I followed the story there. I had nointention of writing about it, and then my
friend Francis Wyndham of the Sunday Times asked me to write about
it. And I went back and did a lot more research, got a lot more documents
and everything and did that story. And in doing it I learnt something
about people who support revolutions, and that was not greatly different
from what Conrad had discovered, in The Secret
Agent.

What did he discover?This woman who supports the anarchist believes she is
so secure and so aristocratic, that when the world is blown up only the
others will be destroyed. She will float serenely above the wreckage. So
there are secure people who encourage revolutionaries. When societies are
not secure it's a different matter.

And your research suggested the novel
Guerrillas?Completely,
yes. The fact that these murders had been committed gave one the courage
to write about an act of murder. I had done the investigation, the
journalism. But to write a work of fiction - it requires a different
approach. Yes, they are based on the same occurrence; but the books were
quite different to write. I spent a long time getting the fictional story
right.

But it was about such an
adventurer?Yes. And I took that and I created a new setting, new motivation,
new people. It is a murder book actually, but it's a real murder, it's not
a joke murder.

It's not a detective
murder.Detective murders are for people who are very secure. I think when
you are not so secure you can't be entertained by murder, and in the
novel, it hangs between two acts of sex, quite awful acts of sex. It's
very violent. I don't know where the violence came from. It's a kind of
moral violence as well, which began to creep up on people.

In the writer's sensibility is there a divide between fact
and fiction? I
think that the person on the outside has to consider it, and he will see
that fact and fiction are entirely separate creations. Fact has to be
scrupulously true to the reality, scrupulously. One must never tamper with
events or statements to make a story nicer. With fiction, one has been
given courage by what had happened to do this story of murder, and so all
the motivations for the murder have to be evident within this manufactured
story. It is not enough, in a work of the imagination, to say that X
decided to murder Y. You have in fiction to give an illusion of cause, an
illusion of a reason, so it requires another kind of narrative. In real
life there might have been no reason.

You say
Guerrillas
was a violent book, but it was a very angry book too. You were looking
at something of which you disapproved.No, I don't think it works like that; I don't think one
disapproves. The story was given me to meditate on. I was able to add
knowledge of people I knew in many places, and the book came. The violence
actually is in the tone. If you read the book aloud you will see that it's
violent in its rhythm. It wasn't angry, it was just violent. The earlier
book, In a Free State, that is horribly violent. The violence runs
right through. It is full of humour, but every joke freezes. If you're
reading the book aloud to an audience, every time they start laughing the
laughter freezes, because what's happening is too awful. Guerrillas
is a continuation of that mood.

A lot of the trouble was in how to
construct Guerrillas. I began it several times and gave up. And
then what I did instinctively - not out of any deep plan - was that
different characters took on the story, so the story developed through
people, and each of the people became more important at different stages.
I remember I had spent about three months trying to write the book - it
was a very long time, it was my first book for three years, I was getting
very anxious. And I was in Wiltshire, in my cottage, and I began to rake
up the leaves one day; I'd tried so often to see the way ahead, and then I
saw the complete way the story had to be done, and I went back and gave up
the leaf-burning, and wrote out very quickly the briefest of notes, which
I then followed scrupulously.

You have written works which
defy classification, like A Way in the World, which is partly autobiographical,
partly history, partly fiction. The form
represents a developing knowledge of the world. The Enigma of Arrival was also a compound of autobiography and fictional
narrative. The
Enigma is a book about
the writer as a writer, and it's a book about England, and the two things
come together. The bit about the writer, the man who came to England in
order to be a writer, and has cheated himself and didn't see great
subjects - that's one story. And the other is a mock-pastoral story of the
English village in which he comes to rest when he's wounded and hurt.
There are many ironies in that story. He comes to rest on an estate owned
by a family with colonial interests; and, as time passes, England, the
country the writer has come to, changes. This place itself in which he's
come to rest begins to fade away. That's the way the book occurred to me.
I couldn't have made it an autobiography. It would have been tedious -
that was not my purpose.You once told me that you could not or would not
write an Indian novel, because it would entail inventing somebody like
yourself, and why take all that trouble when you can write in other ways
about it. I always thought that was a slightly enigmatic statement.
To write
about a place, you need really rather full knowledge. I decided to write
about England in this way, in The Enigma, when I'd been here for
more than thirty years. To write about India … I've always been a visitor
- it's a superficial kind of knowledge. It would make me a semi-interior
writer, to create a figure like myself coming to India, and describe
events and fit the narrator against the Indian background.

In the
Twenties and Thirties Somerset Maugham travelled in the Pacific and in
Asia, and he did those stories - 'The Trembling of the Leaf', 'Rain', and
stories like that. I wonder, if Maugham had simply written realistically
about the people he met and had explored them fully, whether that putative
book wouldn't have been more lasting than the stories, which have gone
with the wind now, and are part of the dust, part of the imperial dust.
Ten or twenty years later, it was all to collapse, and the Maugham stories
suggest a permanence, falsely suggest something eternal about the setting.
A real book about his observations would have been much more interesting
for us today. We'd have had a snapshot of Asia at a critical time. If he'd
been very fair with the material, and had asked the correct questions of
various people, we would have had a sense of China awakening, of Japan in
the distance, and India also. So it would have been more interesting than
these so-called 'universal' stories, which are not universal at all. They
are very colonial, provincial, insular, and they haven't
lasted.

Can you point to writers who deserve to last?
They would be the originals. Writers who
have done something new.

And who would you choose as originals?
Flaubert's
original. Gogol, Balzac - I'm talking about prose writing. Maupassant's
original. And the Indian stories of Kipling.

And
Dickens?Early
Dickens. The element of self-parody becomes overwhelming in Dickens after
a time.

He imitates himself?He died from the self-parody.

But he does
do something fresh earlier on?Very early
on, when he's 24, 25, 26, between Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers,
Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby - these are the great
books. And David Copperfield. I know the academics love the dreary
ones, like Bleak House and Dombey and Son, etcetera, but
they can be pushed to one side. And terrible books like Hard Times
- a terrible book. But there is some kind of political angle to the
appreciation of that book. If you look at the dates of the writers I
mentioned, you'll find that the dates begin at 1834: that's when Balzac -
and then, shortly after, Dickens - began. Flaubert, 1857 - Madame Bovary.
Maupassant is later, in the 1880s. So in less than fifty years all the
great models have occurred, one after the other. It was an extraordinary
period in writing. I do not think there's ever been a period like that,
because this imaginative writing enabled people to possess their
societies. That's the most extraordinary gift that these writers gave
people - the ability to see their societies. In addition, you have, in
1861, du Chaillu, writing about travelling in Africa, and in 1864 or
thereabouts you have Speke, writing about his travels in Uganda. You have
Wallace, in Malaya.

Are they doing a new sort of travel
writing?Absolutely
new, and the books remain great, however much one may not like
them.

Mungo Park or…Mungo
Park is a little earlier, but that was great too. I'm talking about
this period when knowledge of society and the world widens. It lasts a
short time. Du Chaillu, a very attractive writer - he's an American, in
spite of the name. And you must add there 1869 - Mark Twain and
The Innocents Abroad. And Huckleberry Finn, 1884, or was it
earlier? It's very special. It's a remarkable book. It cannot have a
sequel. It cannot be copied. The names I gave you are people who were
describing societies, big societies - France and America.

And I
should add, there's something very interesting in that flawed writer
Stendhal. In The Red and the Black his hero reads Rousseau's
Confessions. That book was finished in 1770, much earlier than the
period Stendhal was writing about, but his hero reads Rousseau to
understand society. So you see that serious function of writing at that
time. The writers today are copying the forms and yet their intention is
much more frivolous: to show off, to do a new kind of sensation, and above
all to tell people what they already know.

I talked earlier about
the official writers of Latin America. There are people who say, about the
problems of Latin America: our history is so bad we can only write about
it in a surrealist way. This, of course, is rubbish. Nothing is so bad
that mind cannot be brought to bear on it.

You said you were
working on two books?Yes, one is
about England and one is autobiographical … but that's later. And for
now, the new book - which will be reviewed and make its way in the world.

How would you like people to react to this book? What would
you like them to take away from Half a Life?I would like them to feel: 'It's me.'

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